The Book Tower

She’d gently questioned Fleet about his ‘project’ (this matchstick structure now took up the best part of their dining table – his bedroom having long since been evacuated because of the leak). She was especially interested in why it was that he hadn’t completed the cathedral itself before moving on to some of the surrounding buildings.
‘But what about this section?’ she’d asked, standing on the cathedral’s south side, where a large hole still gaped, unattractively, at the entrance.
‘It’s not finished,’ Fleet had murmured.
‘Then finish it,’ she’d said.
He’d scowled up at her. ‘It’s not finished,’ he repeated, as if speaking to an imbecile. ‘They haven’t built it yet.’

After finishing the last of its 838 pages, I’m still torn between calling Nicola Barker’s Darkmans either an effectively clever and creepy ghost story or something of a waste of my time. The stumbling blocks are both the book’s incredible length and its sometimes irritating over-confidence. This is a novel that takes a long time to settle in and – if you’re willing – it will eventually begin to get under your skin and appear worthwhile. But I was still having some doubts about it when I reached the halfway mark, which is a disheartening realisation. There is the nagging doubt that if a book takes so long to even hint at taking you anywhere it might not take you anywhere at all. Darkmans does eventually pay off – just about.

For such a long novel, Darkmans doesn’t have an especially huge cast. The number of characters is no greater than a book of a third of its length. Barker does play with them magnificently though, weaving a very intricate set of relationships. And for such a long novel Darkmans doesn’t have an especially complex plot; it just takes time, it rambles, it appears to go off at inexplicable tangents. Most of all it succeeds in perplexing the reader. What it does do, although sadly much, much less than it should, is be at times extremely creepy and unsettling. Darkmans is a modern day ghost story about the past. How the past is always there, turning up unexpectedly, worryingly, surprisingly. How the past can haunt us. For the cast of Darkmans, the shadow of early modern England hangs over them, a time when the English language was getting to grips with itself and the printed word was in its infancy. What the novel does very well is presenting a danger dating from an earlier time that’s recent enough to make some sense, but is distant enough not to fully understand. In other words, imagine a ghost speaking a less refined version of the English language, references, allusions and most of all motives wildly different.

John Scogin is a ghost with a specifically wicked sense of humour. The last of history’s great jesters, Scogin lives on in surviving biographies and, when his remains are interred to make way for a Channel Tunnel rail link, quite possibly in the consciousness of others. These are notably Isidore, dropping normality to run amok in Kent, and his gifted, possibly autistic, son Fleet. The most memorable parts of the book feature Fleet as he slowly reveals his rather unusual and at times disturbing nature. Five years of age, his precocious talents allow him to build an entire catherdral from matchsticks, and to ponder on the Latin root of random words.

Recurring themes link the past with the present throughout the book, most of them weird and unsettling. Sinister black birds and feathers, bells (in the guise of pet collars and mobile phones), fire (as lighters and matches), roofs and tiles, blood, bruising and – strangest of all – feet – are just some of them. Also unsettling is the indecision about whether this is a dark comedy (we witness a Kurdish refugee with an unusual fear of salads and a dysfunctional family who give Mike Leigh a run for his money) or something altogether more disturbing. Barker won’t let you make up your mind, and won’t tell you what’s really going on until right until the end. Or not – I’m still slightly baffled.

Darkmans was my first taste of Nicola Barker’s fiction. She’s an incomparible talent; her characterisations are detailed and convincing and she can unravel a good plot, if at times slightly over-relying on coincidence. The background is convincingly researched and there’s even a mention in there of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, one of the longest novels written in English at 1500 pages. Who knows, Barker might even try to surpass that next time…

I’m glad that this novel is on the Booker shortlist; I’ll be surprised though if it wins. It’s too odd and too experimental and there’s too much left unresolved, but it’s undeniably thought provoking and will give any Booker judge a hard time in justifying their decision about it. Darkmans certainly is extremely baffling and infuriating but – just sometimes – I can accept that as a bold move from a uniquely original author such as Nicola Barker.

Comments [6]

Even though it was thirty-odd years ago, I still have vivid memories of my teacher at junior school reading Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the class. In all the intervening years I’ve never read the book myself, but was recently tempted to buy a copy for my daughter when I saw that the edition with illustrations by Quentin Blake was back in the shops.

Although Dahl’s books have lasted well (Charlie was published in 1964), and will no doubt continue to last for longer still, I have always thought that he belonged in an older, simpler world. This is possibly something to do with memories of him on Saturday morning television, grumpily obliging to review the latest pop releases. We also have a couple of audio books at home – read by Dahl himself – and his accent and tone of voice belongs in an older time, confidently using words like ‘perambulator’ without fear of being queried.

Some of Dahl’s ideas, and sources for humour, could be questioned by today’s most politically correct. He’s fond of grotesques, especially fat people, and there are many in Charlie. For Dahl, the overweight are overindulged and spoilt; where the half-starved and poor (the Bucket family) are good and noble. There’s something of this attitude or approach surviving in Harry Potter I think; Rowling paints the Dursley’s as fat, overindulged and ugly, with the poor and undernourished Harry surviving in the shadows.

Dahl also likes to push things to the extreme; Grandpa Joe isn’t just old, at ninety six he’s positively ancient, as are the other three grandparents he shares a bed with. When Charlie’s father loses his job in the toothpaste factory the family are instantly plunged into a Dickensian nightmare of poverty, complete with a thick blanket of snow on the ground. Charlie has to leave the house for school extra early, walking slowly to conserve his draining energy.

Then there are the Oompa Loompas, rescued by the eccentric and positively sinister Mr Wonka from the jungle – every man, woman and child – to gladly work in his factory. There’s something slightly unsettling about the presence of Oompa Loompas in Wonkaland, but the book was written in 1964 so it’s foolish to look into it with a too discerning eye.

My daughter loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – possibly more so than any other book she’s been exposed to – because Dahl is such a skilled storyteller. At times he’s up there with Dickens (and perhaps Rowling is up there with them both too). The early chapters are cleverly paced and very exciting, even when a child knows the outcome. His characterisation of Wonka, just the other side of sanity, is perfectly measured and I guess – pc or not – the grotesques get their just desserts. After all, it’s just a fun story and nobody can doubt the power of the man’s imagination. There are parts that made me laugh out loud, such as Wonkas’s mad inventions, including the square sweets that look round. Yes, square sweets that look round.

Some of the more obvious warnings in this book now more firmly belong to my parents’ generation, or Dahl’s. He was grumpy on Saturday morning television probably because he he was a book lover and he hated television; who can blame him for that? At least I get this impression by the Oompa Loompa’s reaction to the fate of Mike Teavee:

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

And a word about Quentin Blake – his drawings are fantastic, the acid test being my daughter asking “is there a drawing?” for every scene that suggests an accompanying illustration. Blake gets it right every time.

Comments [2]

After 23 years I’ve finally finished The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. The debut novel by Banks was first published in 1984 and I remember reading a glowing review in Punch magazine at the time (our school kindly provided copies of Punch, Melody Maker and several newspapers in the sixth form library).

My copy of The Wasp Factory features part of the original Punch review in its cover blurb:

The Wasp Factory is a first novel not only of tremendous promise, but also of achievement, a minor masterpiece perhaps.

I never normally quote reviews printed on paperback covers and don’t always read them, but The Wasp Factory is unusual in that it features extracts from both good and bad reviews. Reading the novel, I kept returning to the heated debate raging on the inside cover as I couldn’t decide whether I liked or hated the book. Stick with Punch maybe, or side with The Times:

Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish.

So why has it taken me 23 years? I have a problem with Banks – my Punch review promised so much and when I eventually picked up the book I was disappointed. I abandoned it until now. I’ve also given up on a couple of his other novels and don’t know where to begin with his science fiction. Finally finishing The Wasp Factory, and being swayed both one way and the other by the blurb debate, I had to make my decision. Do I go with The Financial Times:

A Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality….This is an outstandingly good read.

Or sidle up to the Sunday Telegraph reviewer:

No masterpiece and one of the most disagreeable pieces of reading that has come my way in quite a while, but scoring high for pace, narrative control and sheer nasty inventiveness. Iain Banks must be given credit for a polished debut. Enjoy it I did not.

I have had to grimly conclude that I hated this book. I can’t be kind to it like the Sunday Telegraph scribe; the only passages showing any degree of talent are indeed the so-called nasty passages. There are two horrible sequences in the book where Banks shows some narrative flair, but rather than horror for horror’s sake – like passages in a good Clive Barker novel – they were sick for sick’s sake. I found no literary cleverness in this novel, no good prose or interesting characters. The twist at the end is no twist, there are no interesting surprises.

How I wish I could get back the nightmarish few days I spend reading The Wasp Factory. But maybe that’s the whole point. Let me know what you think and we can put our own blurb together.

Comments [6]

I’ve been a latecomer to the fiction of Irvine Welsh. I didn’t really take much notice of him when he burst onto the literary scene in the last decade, and although I dutifully went to see the film of Trainspotting when it was released that was my one and only concession to the Welsh frenzy of the time.

With some authors I just like to leave them alone until all the fuss has died down. I did it with Louis de Bernières and I’m only just coming round to Iain Banks. Irvine Welsh didn’t get my full attention until last year, when I picked up the excellent Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. This year he has come up with a new collection of short stories, the eye-catching If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work.

In these five stories Welsh takes us to the desert, the Canary Islands, California, Chicago and his native Scotland. Diverse locations and diverse voices; the only thing these tales really share in common is their writer’s wit and imagination. The opener Rattlesnakes is a superbly crafted and slightly sickening story of three people caught in a dangerously compromising situation. It reminded me of Quentin Tarantino at his best – think of the Bruce Willis segment in Pulp Fiction and you’re in Rattlenakes territory.

The other stories are all worth reading as well. A missing dog and an enigmatic Korean chef. A serious misunderstanding by a cockney bar owner. An actor researching into a late film maker stumbles across something truly horrific in a tale-with-a-twist that gives Roald Dahl a run for his money. The last -and longest – is perhaps the least accessible in the collection but probably the most rewarding. The Kingdom of Fife is largely written in the Scottish vernacular, which put me in mind of the writing of the great James Kelman. It’s a funny, moving tale of an ex-jockey and his encounters with a couple of middle class equestrians.

It must be said that Welsh doesn’t pull any punches. If you shy away from anything explicit, namely sexual encounters and gritty language, this might not be for you. And it’s taken me a while, but Irvine Welsh now has a place on my reading list. If you’re new to him and want to try him out, this collection is a good enough place to begin.

Comments [3]

Engleby is the latest novel by Sebastian Faulks, most prominent in my library for the superb Birdsong. Engleby is a compelling, believable and at times very worrying book that explores the relationship between the reader and the first person narrator, in this book a narrator of the most unreliable kind.

Mike Engleby is a bright student at Cambridge university in the early 1970s. He’s a loner with hangups but he’s not a neurotic Woody Allen; his voice is laced with arrogance and conceit. Engleby is always right in his own eyes – however odd his choices and personal goals are. This unusual although undeniably strong personality is the crux of the novel; we are charmed by the first person narrator, we trust him and join him for the ride. What do we do if he doesn’t always tell the truth? What if he steps over the line? What if he might be a murderer?

What could be a lighthearted look at seventies university life is marred both by the disappearance of a young female student and Engleby’s dwelling on his grim experiences of public school bullying and abuse. As his reminiscences unfold we learn that one of his worst abusers is later subject to a violent assault; Engleby is also questioned about the girl’s disappearance. He freely admits that, whilst some memories haunt him daily, he is often unable to recall others quite as clearly. The novel follows his progress after university and into the eighties, where he has forged something of a career as a journalist. A man with only one real male friendship and apparently only one relationship with a female, he claims to have met and befriended figures from the world of entertainment and politics, including Jeffrey Archer and Ralph Richardson. But again, is he really telling the truth?

Faulks’ strength is a writer is that we find it hard to condemn Engleby. Whether it’s the petty crime he indulges in or the prospect that he might just be involved in a murder; the influence of the narrator, however unreliable or unstrustworthy, has never been stronger in any other novel I’ve read. What’s even cleverer is the brief points of view of others towards the end of the book. A psychiatrist’s report on Engleby’s narrative throws up several questions about his personality and behaviour; points I’d considered yet dismissed. Dismissed because I had to keep reading this compelling voice.

Engleby is a fascinating and intellectually absorbing novel, keeping its final trump card until the very last page. Sebastian Faulks is a very fine writer indeed. This might just be his finest.

Comments [6]